


don't go home without me

by ephemera (incognitajones)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: (I hope), F/M, First Time, No Angst, RebelCaptain Secret Santa Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 19:11:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13173381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/pseuds/ephemera
Summary: They don’t say anything more, don’t discuss where they’re headed or what they’re going to do. She simply follows him through the halls of the base to his quarters, automatically adjusting her stride to his lopsided gait.





	don't go home without me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [taramidala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/taramidala/gifts).



> Written for taramidala, whose prompt was "warm-hearted, relationship-establishing, unadulterated joyful mush.” I hope this is everything you wished for!

A wordless whoop of joy over the comms is followed by Han Solo’s disembodied voice crowing, _“Great shot, kid! That was one in a million!”_

The war room on Yavin 4 hangs poised, still and silent for a heavy instant—then it erupts into chaos. People are shouting in dozens of languages, sobbing, crouching on the floor with clenched fists, leaping up from their control stations to wave their arms and tentacles and lekku or anything else they have. The tiny Princess in white is smiling, but her eyes are wet.

Jyn isn’t crying. She thinks she might be happy, but it’s buried under a numb layer of shock. Standing beside her, Cassian doesn’t shout or scream either. His grip on his cane tightens until his knuckles turn white, and she can feel his long exhale where she’s pressed against his ribs. In the final moments of the invisible battle overhead, they’d drawn closer and closer together, driven to seek comfort as they had on the beach, until she was plastered against his side.

Jyn reaches out and rests her hand on Cassian’s arm just as she did on the shuttle before Scarif, before the hours of blood and fire that will always divide her life in two. He had smiled at her then, bright and disbelieving, but there was no time for anything more. Now, he turns his body into hers and curls his hand around her waist, carefully, slowly. He tips his cheek to rest against her temple.

She slides her arm around him in turn and just like that they’re hugging. In public. Sure, the room is full of people weeping in each other’s arms—but she’s still touching him in front of strangers. 

Kriff it, Jyn decides. She wraps both her arms tight around Cassian, low on his hips where it won’t press on his cracked ribs or the healing scars from surgery. His arms come around her in turn and the handle of his cane digs into her back. His head tilts lower, his lips brush the strands of her hair hanging in her face as he whispers, “I’m glad you’re here to see this, Jyn.”

“Me too.” She tightens her grip on his jacket even more and smiles so wide that it hurts her cheeks. She must look witlessly happy, and she doesn’t care, she isn’t worried about wanting to hide it, because Cassian is smiling back at her just as idiotically. Are they this fucking obvious to everyone else? It feels like one of the massive holo-boards of Coruscant is floating over her head, announcing in flashing mile-high letters that Jyn Erso is moon-eyed for this man. And whenever she looks at him, she sees the same bemused, stupidly happy expression mirrored on his face. 

She can’t stop staring at Cassian’s mouth. It wasn’t the first thing she noticed about him—that would have been his cold gaze evaluating her—and once she did, she didn’t like the hard, sullen line it always seemed to settle into when he looked at her. But she soon realized that it gave away his feelings: tiny twitches at the corners when he was amused and didn’t want to show it, thinning lips or a subtle jaw flex when he didn’t agree with his orders but couldn’t voice an objection. And then at some point she stopped watching his mouth for his tells and started watching it because she couldn’t look away, or keep herself from wondering how he’d kiss. 

“It’s going to be nuts in here for a while.” She can barely hear her own voice over the din of the war room.

Cassian jerks his head toward the door. “Let’s go.”

They don’t say anything more, don’t discuss where they’re headed or what they’re going to do. She simply follows him through the halls of the base to his quarters, automatically adjusting her stride to his lopsided gait.

Cassian leans his cane against the bedframe and sits down to take off his boots and tuck them neatly under his bed. Jyn kicks hers off, sending them flying, and raises her eyebrows at him when he frowns. 

“You’ll just trip over them in the morning,” he grumbles.

“Am I staying?” she asks. 

“If you want to.” His gaze and his voice are steady, but blood surges up into the back of his neck and the tips of his ears, tinting them red. 

How can he still have any doubt of her? “Of course I do.” 

Jyn steps between his knees, settling her hands on his shoulders as his come up to rest on her hips. She’s never felt like this before. She’s not scared, but there’s a bubbling, fizzing sensation of nerves in her stomach rising up into her throat. No-one’s ever looked at her the way Cassian is right now, as if she were the most precious thing in the galaxy. Like he doesn’t deserve her. 

She gives into impulse and touches her right hand to the mouth that’s been driving her mad for weeks now. She traces her finger over the border of his upper lip, feeling the contrast between soft skin and the prickles of his facial hair.

He nuzzles her fingers and ducks his head to kiss her scarred knuckles one by one. Sizzling sparks race up her arm and she nudges his chin up, bending down to finally taste his mouth. Cassian’s hands flex on her hips, slide up to tug the hem of her shirt free and then his fingers are on her bare skin. Lightning strikes up her spine to the base of her skull and her head goes light. She has to brace herself on his shoulders to hold herself up when her legs start to shake.

Between kisses Cassian starts to ask, “When did you—” and then the words are lost in another sighing kiss. But she thinks she knows what he meant.

“You mean, this?” Jyn curls her hand in his hair and kisses him again to illustrate. “When I started to want this?”

He nods. “For me, it was on Jedha. I’d read your file, I was convinced I knew exactly who you were. But then you wouldn’t stop surprising me. Pulling that little girl out of the way, talking to Chirrut, protecting K-2—you didn’t act like the person in that file.”

Jyn laughs, her fingers winding into the roots of his hair. “I must be more shallow. I was interested in fucking you about, oh, two minutes after we met,” she confesses. “But after Eadu… that’s when I knew it was bad. I thought you’d betrayed me, and I still didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to make any excuse for you that I could.” 

An instinctive, animal part of her, something buried deep below the surface of her conscious mind, decided to trust this man. Or not even decided; that implies a deliberate, rational balancing of factors that never happened. At some point between wanting to shoot him and being blindsided by his belief in her in the hangar, she just—knew. She’d jump off a cliff if Cassian said he’d be at the bottom to catch her. And the worst part is, she’s not even reluctant or unwilling about it. She’s not angry at being caught in the net of this feeling, whatever is it, because he’s right there with her. 

“Thank you,” he says. “For giving me another chance.”

“You too,” she whispers. She puts her hands back on his shoulders and pushes him to lie back on the bed. She wants to fuck him into next week, and then wrap him up in a blanket and make him rest until the shadows under his eyes are gone. And she's pretty sure she can manage at least the first of those.

They’re slow and stumbling at first, clumsy in their eagerness. Jyn has some experience with sex, but very little with intimacy. And judging from the way Cassian’s hands shake as he works at the fastenings of her shirt, neither has he. It makes her awkward and self-conscious by the time they’re both naked, but she wants to touch him so badly that she forces herself past that.

She cradles his face in her hands, drops quick, soft kisses underneath his eyes, over the bridge of his nose, at the corners of his mouth. He shivers and his hands slide to the curve of her waist as he presses up into the contact, nuzzling into her cheek.

He flinches when her fingers lightly trace the hard spare lines of his ribcage and Jyn’s hands jerk away. “Did that hurt?” she asks, searching his face for signs of strain. But he’s smiling. 

“No—you were so gentle, it tickled.”

Jyn feels a wicked smile twist the corner of her lips. ”You shouldn’t have told me that.” Deliberately, she runs her fingers up his flank again for the pleasure of feeling him shudder under her touch. “You’re at my mercy now, Captain Andor. I could do all sorts of things to you without fear of retaliation.” She strokes her palm down the warm, taut lines of his forearm, laces her fingers with his to lift his hand and kisses his wrist where the skin is so thin she can feel his quick pulse thrumming under her mouth. 

Cassian's lips part and his eyes look darker. “Without retaliation?” he murmurs. “Hardly.”

Jyn raises an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? I’m not ticklish. What do you think you’re going to do to me?”

“Touch you. Everywhere. Like this.” He draws feathery patterns on her skin and she closes her eyes. “My mouth on you, all of you, my tongue—”

Jyn can’t listen to any more, she’ll explode just from listening to Cassian say those things in his low, hoarse voice. And the thought of that mouth— 

She bends down to kiss him, to cut off his speech, and then moves lower. His skin is warm as she explores him with lips and tongue and the barest hint of teeth. Cassian whines very, very softly the first time Jyn sucks a mark into his skin, and she lets her nails scrape just a little harder down his thighs. The next whine comes out stronger and he arches up against her mouth.

After that, Jyn loses time. As hard as she tries to catalogue each new sensation it all softens into an urgent, messy blur. Her head is clouded, dazed with want. When she comes it’s slow and sustained, rippling over her in waves so easy and simple that it feels like she’s dissolving into pleasure. Cassian kisses her through it, keeps kissing her, swallowing each tiny gasp and moan that she can’t help letting escape.

It’s so good but it’s still not enough, not until she can make him feel the same. She manages to quicken the pace of her hips, grinds more than thrusts as he pants against her breasts, mouthing at them, fingers dragging down her spine. A harsh, desperate sound tears from Cassian’s throat and his whole body tenses in an arc, then goes slack and shuddery underneath her. 

He blinks up at her with dazed, half-closed eyes and Jyn laughs, softly triumphant. “Did I wear you out?”

“I’m an injured man,” he protests, and she rolls off him before her weight can burden him too much. 

“Hey, I didn’t say stop.” He pulls her back into another kiss.

Jyn kisses him again and again and again, taking her time to memorize him, until her lips know every line of his, her tongue knows the taste of every breath and groan. She’d know him in the dark, would know him anywhere. She runs her nose along the line of his jaw and breathes deep, inhaling his smell. She can’t pick apart the components of it, other than a slight chemical tang of blaster oil, but she’d recognize it blindfolded. The whole room smells like Cassian, and it makes her simultaneously comforted and hungry for more of him. 

Jyn isn’t sure what the rules of this are, but she’s going to stay as long as possible. She needs the reassurance of his skinny, wiry strength in her arms to be sure that this isn’t a dream. (Well, who cares if it is? It’s a good one, and that’s all that matters.) 

Her mouth won’t leave his, even if they’re sharing each other’s breath more than kissing at the moment. She runs her bottom lip over his jaw in an open-mouthed caress, his stubble stinging the soft flesh of her mouth. She doesn’t ever want to stop kissing him. In fact, she’s giving serious consideration to never moving again. Maybe they can shuffle through the halls of the base this way, arms wound around each other and attached at the lips. She pictures Draven’s expression when Cassian wanders in late for a briefing, towing her along. 

She laughs, puffing warm air across Cassian’s chin, and he cranes his head back just far enough to look at her without going cross-eyed. “What’s so funny?”

“I was just imagining Draven’s reaction,” she murmurs. 

“I see what you mean.” Cassian laughs too, his chest shifting underneath her. “He’ll get over it.”

But that thought has brought the outside world into this sanctuary between the two of them, and now Jyn can’t stop thinking about it. She lifts herself up on one elbow so that she can look directly at him. The swooping freefall in her stomach returns, that feeling she can’t identify as anxiety, nervousness or excitement. 

“People are going to know,” she points out as neutrally as she can. “Or speculate, at least.”

The stress lines between Cassian’s brows and around his eyes return. Something at the corner of his mouth vanishes, and it’s only after it disappears that she realizes it was a smile. “Is that a problem?”

“I don’t want it to be a problem for you.” Jyn trails her fingers up the warm, bare skin of his arm, across the span of his shoulder, and plays with the ends of his hair where they lay against his nape. She feels the line of his body pressed against hers shiver. 

“Why would it be?” His eyes are clear and guileless, his frown looks sincere. Jyn has to look away from the soft affection in that dark gaze or she won’t be able to think straight. He can’t possibly be that naïve, can he? 

She focuses on dragging a fingertip down the line of his collarbone and the way he swallows hard when she rests it in the hollow of his throat. “I know what they think of me. What was it Mothma called me? A criminal, undisciplined… I don’t want them to think less of you because you have a stray ex-Partisan tagging after you.”

“Fuck them.” Cassian’s voice is harsh and angry in a way she’s rarely heard. Startled, she rears back and stares at him.

“Jyn, if they can’t see that you’re an asset—you’re brave, you’re skilled, a good tactician, hells, you’re better at hand to hand than half the instructors…” He shakes his head on the pillow and a lock of hair falls into his eyes. She pushes it back. 

“Besides, who cares what they think? As long as _you_ know that I trust you, that’s what matters.” He curls his hand around the back of her neck, twisting his fingers in her hair and pulling her down for another long, breathless kiss.

“If you're a stray and you followed me home, doesn’t that mean I get to keep you?” he whispers, his lips moving against hers. “Please?”

Jyn swallows hard but her voice still cracks when she tells him, “Yes. You’re stuck with me now.” She tightens her arms around him and turns her head into his neck to hide her trembling. 

Cassian is _hers_. Maybe it’s unthinkable and ridiculous, but that’s irrelevant—it just _is_. There’s no point in arguing with it, any more than there is to ignoring gravity. He came back for her, he chose her, he’s here because he wants to be. He wants her mouth on his mouth, her hands on his body, her body in his bed. They’ve marked each other in some indefinable, indelible way; he belongs to her, and she belongs to him in return, no matter how long or how short the rest of their time turns out to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to FebruarySong (ohbeeone) for helping to smooth out the rough spots.
> 
> The title is borrowed from [a song by Lights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_x7uQoDkK8).


End file.
